America Needs YOU to Track Covid-19

The government struggled to publish high-quality data on the virus, so the unofficial Covid Tracking Project stepped up

- By Amanda Kolson Hurley

At the start of 2020, Amanda French was in between academic jobs. Her mother had died about a year earlier, and she’d taken time off to help settle her affairs. Then the pandemic hit, interrupting her employment search, and she was alone outside Raleigh, N.C., with little to do but doomscroll through Twitter, as she described it.

Someone she followed online put out a call for volunteers to assist with a new project tallying how many Covid tests were being run across the U.S.—something the public wasn’t getting a straight answer on from the federal government. “I had nothing to do. I was at home alone, anyways,” French says. “It was much healthier than reading all the scary news.” So on March 18, she signed up.

Since then, the Covid Tracking Project—run by a small army of data-gatherers, most of them volunteers—has become perhaps the most trusted source on how the pandemic is unfolding in the U.S. The website has been referenced by epidemiologists and other scientists, news organizations, state health officials, the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and the Biden transition team. There are other reliable sources for pandemic statistics, but the project stands out for its blend of rich, almost real-time data presented in a comprehensible way. “I think they’ve done extraordinary work and have met an important need,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which publishes its own set of pandemic data (and draws some information from the Covid Tracking Project). “They’re tracking things that aren’t being tracked.”